Exam Best Practices


Assessment Design Home


Paper Best Practices


Creative Assessment Alternatives


Creative Grading Alternatives

There are several simple strategies to mitigate cheating in online exams from how you craft your questions to monitoring test taking. The Office of Teaching and Learning encourages the use of Proctorio testing software to record and archive testing sessions when using high-stakes exams. Quiz settings in Canvas also offer a variety of ways to control the testing experience and promote academic honesty. This section will include instructions on using Proctorio and Canvas tools, as well as provide guidance on developing strong test questions.

Help With Exams

Proctorio

UVU has purchased Proctorio Testing Software to monitor students remotely while they take exams via a webcam. These sessions are archived for review. You can learn more about Proctorio at the Office of Teaching and Learning’s website.

IMPORTANT!

Proctorio requires students to have access to a computer with a web camera. Make sure students know they will need one in plenty of time prior to the exam so they can be ready. 

Also, please encourage your students to prepare for their first exam by completing the Proctorio Practice Quiz to test their computer settings.  It’s also important to provide the Student Proctorio Guide and Troubleshooting Chart to your students.

Canvas Quiz Settings

Canvas quiz settings are a valuable tool to increase exam integrity. Consider setting the following options when you create your tests (see figure below): 

  • Check “Shuffle Answers”

  • Check “Time Limit” 

    • Suggest 1 minute per “recall type” question

  • Uncheck “Let Students See the Correct Answers”

  • Consider “Show one question at a time”

    • Makes it more difficult to share exams

  • Limit test availability dates

screenshot of Canvas quiz settings

Canvas Question Banks

 

Using Canvas Question banks can support academic integrity. They also offer more flexibility than quizzes populated with questions. Here are instructions on how to create the question bank. Once the question banks are created you can then create a quiz with a question group linked to the question bank. 

Creating and using question banks in this way offers the following advantages:

    • Easily update questions without having to change a quiz
    • Quiz can randomly pull questions so students get different questions
    • Quiz can pull from more than one question bank to create comprehensive exams

Contact the Office of Teaching and Learning to learn more.

Tips for Strengthening Your Exam

Honor Statements and Stating Consequences of Cheating

According to a study titled “Deterring Cheating in Online Environments”, honor statements in exams can discourage cheating. Include an initial question such as “I affirm any answers given on this exam will demonstrate my own learning of the material with no unauthorized material or outside help” as a true / false question. Be explicit in the test instructions regarding the behavior you expect during the exam. 

These same researchers also found that putting a strong statement about the consequences of cheating at the beginning of the exam reduced cheating on exams by 56 percent. 

Crafting Your Exam Questions

How you craft your questions is one of the most powerful ways to ensure students submit their own thoughts and ideas. Consider some of the following strategies as you develop your exam questions:

  • Write questions that do NOT have an existing answer. These could include:
    • Ethical questions
    • Analysis of a concept, model, or principle applied to a real-world situation
    • Ideas for solving local or current world problems
  • Choose measurable action verbs for your questions such as 'demonstrate,' 'apply,' 'develop,' and 'explain'
  • Avoid common or questions easily found with a simple internet search. These would include such things as dates, locations, or key players. 
  • Write scenario response questions where students apply real solutions to fictitious situations by: 
    • Using personal experience, experiments, or activities to answer a question
    • Promoting transfer and adaptation of ideas into new and appropriate contexts
  • Ask about local, specific, and/or current topics
  • Use plausible distractors. Do NOT make it possible for students to select the correct answer simply because the wrong answers are so clearly wrong.
  • Students rank answers according to some specified criteria rather than selecting a single answer 

Open Book Exams

Faculty might consider using an open-book exam, using the tips suggested above to create strong questions. This has the added benefit of assessing a student’s critical thinking abilities rather than their ability to simply recall facts.   

Laura Killam, a faculty member at Nipissing University, stated in her recent Blog post, ‘Exam Design’ “The facts of this [COVID 19] situation lead me to believe that there is a high risk of cheating if educators take a traditional and punitive approach to exam delivery. Students are under unprecedented levels of stress. Students are desperate to pass and trying to manage so many things right now that these circumstances are definitely right for cheating.”

Allowing students to use any valuable resources provided or researched, decreases stress levels allowing students to focus on demonstrating competency rather than focusing on a grade. Again, this is only a successful strategy if you have created questions that require students to synthesize information in meaningful ways which meet your course objectives.

References and Additional Resources